Kiwi space race gathers pace
It already has liftoff – and now Kiwi space company Rocket Lab is eyeing up two space flights a month and a second launch pad.
Founder Peter Beck made the bold prediction ahead of the twoweek window that begins on Friday to launch the company’s first commercial rocket.
There was tremendous growth in the industry, and no shortage of work from the company’s clients, who maintained satellite fleets in the hundreds, Beck said.
‘‘We’ll just keep scaling until there’s no point of building or launching any more.’’
That would hopefully mean getting to the point later in the year where there was one flight a month from its launch site on the Ma¯hia Peninsula.
This could be increased to two launches a month by 2019 and a launch a week by 2020.
Rocket Lab’s team is growing by between three and five people a week in New Zealand, while its current market valuation sits at more than $1.4 billion.
Although technically an American company, 75 per cent of its roughly 230 staff are Kiwi.
Growth has been rapid, since its Electron Rocket programme was launched in 2013 on the back of venture capital from Silicon Valley.
The Rutherford engine – the world’s first and only 3D-printed rocket engine – followed soon after.
While Rocket Lab’s research, development and launch control facility is based in Auckland, it also has a 1.2-hectare production facility in the United States that is aiming to build 100 engines this year.
‘‘Rocket Lab is one of these 10-year overnight successes,’’ Beck said. ‘‘I started the company way back in 2006, then the next milestone was in 2009, when we became the first private company in the southern hemisphere to reach space.’’
Along with a Kiwi can-do attitude, there’s a certain amount of classic Kiwi humour in this operation.
The company’s first test flight, which failed 100 seconds before reaching orbit, was aptly named ‘‘It’s A Test’’.
The second launch at the start of this year, cautiously named ‘‘Still Testing’’, successfully delivered four spacecraft into a variety of orbits.
That success got the company’s confidence up, and has led to its third test – launching another rocket named ‘‘It’s Business Time’’ some time between this Friday and next Thursday.
‘‘We will be scaling massively, with rockets coming off the production line at just a tad over one a month right now,’’ Beck said.
A number of factors have helped Rocket Lab get its foothold.
The first was concentration on what Beck called ‘‘the race to the small’’.
While the likes of SpaceX grabs headlines globally in its race to create bigger rockets that carry larger payloads and aim for Mars, a new market has been created for rockets capable of deploying far smaller cube satellites, which come as small as a football.
The ‘‘race to the big’’ was a needle-mover for civilisation but most of the stuff we relied on in our day-to-day lives – GPS, weather forecasts, telecommunication services – was small.
‘‘A spacecraft that was the size of your average family car is now the size of a microwave or smaller,’’ Beck said.
‘‘Unless you’re lifting humans or school buses to orbit, what you want is small and responsive little rockets, and that’s the exact market niche that we’ve gone after.’’
It’s not such a small niche either – the Electron rocket is capable of lifting about two-thirds of all the satellites launched in 2015.
‘‘We searched the world for a launch site that would achieve the inclination that we needed and the frequency that we needed, and we ended up back in New Zealand,’’ Beck said.
‘‘New Zealand has a huge advantage over most countries, because you can’t launch over land and you can’t launch over other countries, so what really suits you well is a small island in the middle of nowhere.’’